Casino games, including roulette, on electronic terminals in a high street betting shop.
Photograph: Alex Segre/Rex Features

Racing has much to look forward to in 2014, with prize money widely expected to set a record, though whether that will be enough to satisfy the more pig-headed members of the Racehorse Owners' Association remains to be seen.

But there is always room for improvement and, since this is the right time to express one's hopes for the year ahead, here is an earnest wish for 2014. Please could this be the year when the British Horseracing Authority comes to its senses and aligns itself with the right side of the debate over casino machines in betting shops?

The machines which the big chains insist on calling Fixed Odds Betting Terminals – though FOBTs have nothing at all to do with traditional betting – have been a recurring theme in this column for several years. The last Labour government took the idiotic and calamitous decision to allow roulette and other fixed-margin casino games into what had previously been "betting" shops back in 2005, and the poisonous consequences have been spreading through the system since.

FOBTs are toxic. Unlike betting, which has fluid margins, their margin is small but irrevocably fixed. FOBTs require no thought or consideration of chance by either the player or the operator, and while they offer the illusion of control by allowing the players to pick their numbers, the process of taking their money is entirely mechanical.

The maths which underpins a FOBT is unbeatable and will remain so for as long as we live in a universe in which an apple falls down rather than up. Once it is plugged in and switched on, a FOBT stops making money for its owner only when it is standing idle.

This is why so many shops have clustered in Britain's most deprived areas since 2005. The operators are simply going where the bodies are and the most deprived neighbourhoods tend to have the highest population density too. As a result, local economies which were already depressed have been further suffocated thanks to the mechanical extraction of money via FOBTs.

Racing's interests have been affected too. Clearly the machines offer fierce competition for the punter's pound but the toxin also has more insidious effects. Pre-FOBTs the high street bookie was an accepted part of the urban landscape. From legalisation in the early 1960s onwards the relationship between British society and its betting industry had developed from one of reluctant toleration to mature acceptance. Now that relationship, too, is being poisoned.

And poisoned, shamefully, with the encouragement of the BHA. "Betting shops are pivotal to the funding of British racing," Will Lambe, the authority's director of public affairs and policy, said last year, "and as such we do not support any measure [to restrict FOBTs] that could compromise their financial viability."

Elsewhere, however, the tide is turning. Opposition to the destructive effects of casinos on the high street is a rare example of a cause which unites both the Guardian and the Daily Mail, and Ed Miliband has already promised to give councils the power to restrict FOBTs if Labour wins the 2015 election, an outcome which is currently top-priced at 8-13.

If the next government has the sense to address that disastrous decision back in 2005, either by banning FOBTs or severely restricting stakes, the big bookmakers would have little option but to start being bookmakers again. Among all sports, football included, racing is the most natural betting medium there is, and would be ideally placed to take advantage.

At present the BHA is part of the FOBT problem. With a little more foresight it could decide instead to be part of the solution.